Reamde

by Neal Stephenson

He suspected that they were already facebooking and twittering this, that hipsters in San Francisco coffee bars were even now ROFLing and OMGing at photos of Peter with the Glock.

“Everyone wants to fire his carbine, but no one buys ammo—and 5.56 is kind of expensive these days because all the nut jobs are convinced it’s going to be banned.”

Richard had attended via speakerphone from British Columbia. Speakerphones normally sucked, but the technology had served him well in that case, since it had enabled him to roll his eyes, bury his head in his hands, and, when it got really bad, hit the Mute button and stomp around the room cussing.

“Donald, look. You’re the only guy in this particular sector of the economy who has the whole ancient-languages thing down pat to the extent that you do. Everyone else just totally makes this stuff up. When some guy wants a word that seems exotic, he’ll throw in a couple of apostrophes. Maybe smash a couple of letters together that don’t normally go, like Q and Z. That’s what we’re dealing with here.”

Peter reached into a large external pocket of his coat and pulled out a DVD case containing a single unmarked disk, white on top, iridescent purple on the bottom. “Here it is.” Wallace looked disgusted. “That’s how you want to deliver it?” “Is there a problem?” “I brought a notebook computer. No DVD slot. Rather hoped you’d bring it on a thumb drive.” Peter considered this. “I think that can be arranged. Hold on a second.”

This—keeping Ivanov happy, keeping his paranoia in check—was an aspect of the problem that Peter and Csongor had evidently not been thinking about very hard, and they gaped at her. She shook off a wave of mild irritation. “In management-speak, there are metrics that we can use to set expectations and show progress toward a goal.”

They got rid of most of their guns and took advantage of Canada’s surprisingly easygoing sword laws, riding around the provincial byways with five-foot claymores strapped to their backs.

Sokolov was favorably impressed by the fact that he had not yet shit his pants. Men always made crude jokes about people pissing their pants with fear, but in Sokolov’s experience, shitting the pants was more common if it was a straightforward matter of extreme emotional stress. Pants pissing was completely unproductive and suggested a total breakdown of elemental control. Pants shitting, on the other hand, voided the bowels and thereby made blood available to the brain and the large muscle groups that otherwise would have gone to the lower-priority activity of digestion. Sokolov could have forgiven Peter for shitting his pants, but if he had pissed his pants, then it really would have been necessary to get rid of him. In any case, Peter had done neither of these things yet.

Sokolov had never been a spy per se, but he had undergone a bit of training in basic spycraft as part of his transition into private commerce. Spies were supposed to have a strong intuitive sense of when they had been noticed, when someone else’s eyes were on them. Or at least that was the line of bullshit that the spycraft trainers liked to lay on their students. If true, then no Western spy could tolerate even a few seconds’ exposure to a Chinese street, since that internal sense would be setting off alarms continuously—and by no means false alarms. If they had dressed up in clown suits, strapped strobe lights to their foreheads, and sprinted out into traffic firing tommy guns into the air, they would not have drawn more immediate and intense scrutiny than they did simply by entering this public space as non-Chinese persons.

But he’d had no idea, in those days, how guys like Don Donald and Devin Skraelin actually worked. He had guessed that they must be kind of like engineers, meaning that you had to have lots of meetings with them and explain the problem in PowerPoint presentations and get preliminary scoping meetings and contractual hoo-ha out of the way before they would actually begin to ply their trade per se.

Having now lived for a few decades in parts of the United States and Canada where cooking was treated quite seriously, and having actually employed professional chefs, he was fascinated by the midwestern/middle American phenomenon of recombinant cuisine. Rice Krispie Treats being a prototypical example in that they were made by repurposing other foods that had already been prepared (to wit, breakfast cereal and marshmallows). And of course any recipe that called for a can of cream of mushroom soup fell into the same category. The unifying principle behind all recombinant cuisine seemed to be indifference, if not outright hostility, to the use of anything that a coastal foodie would define as an ingredient.

People who watched too many movies about hackers had all sorts of ludicrous ideas about what they were capable of. In general, they hugely overestimated hackers’ ability to do certain things. But there was one area in which hackers were routinely underestimated, and that was lock picking. For them, picking locks was a nice way to kick back and relax after a long day of doing pen tests on corporate networks.

Different special forces units around the world had different philosophies as to what was the best way to conduct close-quarters fighting. In Spetsnaz, it was a fixed doctrine that you should be in continual motion and most of that movement should take place at an altitude of considerably less than a meter. Standing there like an asshole looked good in cowboy movies but was not a viable tactic in a world filled with fully automatic weapons.

The Chinese community in Vancouver was huge: a city within a city, populous enough that the appearance of an unfamiliar Chinese-looking and -acting person in a store or an apartment building would not arouse any particular notice. Olivia’s memory of the conversation was a bit hazy—she was a lousy drinker—but she was pretty sure he had used the term “spy Disneyland.” And when she had asked for an explanation, he had pointed out that a girl like Olivia could go to a place like Vancouver’s Chinatown and try to pass as Chinese and see if anyone detected the subterfuge. It would give her a feeling for what would be entailed in working as a deep cover agent in China, but it would be as safe, and as fake, as Disneyland.

“English?” he asked. “American,” she said. “Your confusion is understandable, but I was inquiring, not as to nationality, but as to language,” said the man with the assault rifle. “I’ll endeavor to make my questions less ambiguous in future.”

As Olivia gazed into the terminal building, all her alarm bells went off at once. All the bad things that she’d been trained to look for were there on display, as if this were a spy training film, carefully designed to depict the worst imaginable scenario. Every bench, every snack bar, every security checkpoint had one or two loitering, watchful men, pretending to pay attention to their mobile phones. Some of them even had the temerity to wear sunglasses indoors.

They occupied the first two floors, and Zula the third, of a big old house on Capitol Hill: Seattle’s most oddly named neighborhood, in that Seattle was not a capital and had never been graced with anything resembling a capitol.

“Unless they have friends or something who live here. There are some sketchy characters down in the I.D.” By this Corvallis meant the International District, not all that far from Georgetown. As West Coast Chinatowns went, it was small—nothing compared to San Francisco’s or Vancouver’s—but still managed to produce the occasional gambling-den massacre straight out of a Fu Manchu novel.

“But where does the whole Christian right-wing thing enter into it? What’s that about?” Jake’s blissful expression became somewhat guarded. “When we had children, religion came back into our lives, as it does for many people, and Elizabeth has been my pathfinder as far as that is concerned. For me it’s about being part of a community that is not based just on geographical proximity or money, but on spiritual values. There are no cathedrals in the mountains. You create your own church just as you hunt or grow your own food, split your own firewood. And just like those things, it might seem simple and rude to people who live in places with cathedrals and schools of theology.” “What about the politics?” He considered it for a moment. The look on his face was a bit hopeless, as if he despaired of ever explaining it to a cosmopolitan outsider like Olivia. “Again,” he quoted, “‘behold the boasted world has come to nothing … let me begin anew.’ What you’re seeing isn’t politics. It’s the absence of politics. It’s us trying to live in a way where we never have to put up with politics and politicians again. That means that when the politicians come after us, try to interfere with our lives, we have to defend ourselves, with passive and nonviolent measures when we can, but, failing that…” “With guns?” “We take full advantage of our 2A rights.” “2A?” “Second Amendment.”

There was a common saying in the biz/tech world that “As hire As, and Bs hire Cs,” the point being that as long as you continued to recruit only the very best people, they would attract others, but as soon as you let your standards slip, the second-raters would begin to seine up third-raters to act as their minions and advance their agendas.

The next time she looked at the clock, an hour and a half had disappeared, and she was only getting in deeper; emails she had sent at the beginning of this session had spawned entire threads of responses in which she was now profoundly entangled, and people were threatening to set up conference calls.

It was Saturday morning and FBI agents were thumbing emails from the sidelines of their kids’ soccer games. “Out of office” responses were bouncing around the system like pachinko balls.